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Saturday, 27 October 2012

My MoFo Kitchen Tour.

I love reading about and looking at pictures of other peoples kitchens. It's awesome to get a glimpse into where my favourite food bloggers spend their time and it's also great way to get decorating or storage tips and ideas.

My house was built in the 1840's as a workers cottage, layout wise I'm not sure how much it's changed on the inside since then. I imagine that what is now our living room/kitchen area probably used to be two smaller rooms. This area is right at the bottom of the house & because our house is on a hill it's underground in the lounge area but not in the kitchen. It doesn't get much natural light because of the walled garden so we picked white units when we re-did the kitchen.

I love that these two rooms are joined together. It's nice to be able to do all of our cooking and hanging out in one space, it's great when we have friends over and it saves on heating bills in the winter because the whole area gets nice & toasty every time you turn the oven on!

When we moved in the kitchen didn't look anything like this, we had to rip down & re-plaster all of the walls and put in a whole new kitchen. I still love the units, handles, tiles & worktops we chose when we moved in but at the time I didn't really cook or bake and I didn't even think about replacing the oven. My main problem with it is that the gas heats really unevenly meaning that I can only bake 10 cupcakes at a time because the back corners burn before anything else is cooked and the bottom of the oven is way, way cooler than the middle. It's pretty damn inconvenient and because of the width of the oven we can't get a new one because they don't make the kind I want in this size! I've been searching for a while so if you spot a 55cm, double non-fan electric oven with a gas hob lemme know!

I tidied a bit before I took that picture but there's still a tray of roasted squash cooling on the stovetop!

Just behind the table in the lounge is my cookbook shelf.

The drawers next to the stove have cutlery & knives and stuff at the top (you don't need to see that) and random kitcheny things live in the middle - I love the cupcake tin, it's perfect for all the little things that are super annoying if they're loose in the drawer!

Pans live at the bottom. I've always wanted one of those racks on the ceiling to hang my pans on but as you can see from the first picture the ceiling's way too low for that!

The cupboard to the other side of the stove, below the kettle & toaster, houses my baking supplies, tupperware, baking trays & cake tins. I'd never realised before how much the top shelf is leaning under the weight of all that flour - maybe I need to counterbalance it with a brick or two!

You can see the toaster in this next picture too, so we're panning around to the right!

One of my favourite kitchen gadgets, my stand mixer, lives on top of the microwave. I love it so much, I mix all of my frosting in there and use it to knead bread. It also has a food processor attachment that I use all the time. You can see into my little garden too, that tarpaulin is hiding our barbecue, I think it was warm enough to use it twice this summer! As you can see the draining rack is full. It's always like this, I was trying to wait until nothing was drying to take my pictures but it's been a week so I gave up!

In this picture we pan around to the right again to where I was standing where I took the first picture!

As you can see I have a pretty decent tote bag collection... really, I have way too many - I just can't resist a tote!

As you can see our fridge is in a little porch just outside the kitchen! That's also where we keep all of our recycling - I'm a little obsessed with recycling. We pay for someone to come & collect the plastic the council doesn't recycle and I take my Tetrapak's to a recycling point a couple of streets away. When we first moved in the people living here before us had their fridge where the drawers, blender, coffee maker & scales are now but that left almost no work or storage space and I didn't like the idea of having the fridge right next to the stove.

Next to the washing machine is the dishwasher, and right next to the tote bags is the pantry. I have no idea how people who take tote bags almost everywhere can end up with this many carrier bags but hey, free bin bags, I'm not complaining!

The bottom of the cupboard is where we keep big things like cereal boxes that don't fit on the other shelves and new things that aren't open yet. We always have back-up nooch & apple sauce down there as well as my stash of fun American things like Soy Curls, Chococonut bars & cans of pumpkin!

Last year I added this plastic storage container for my nuts & seeds and the under shelf basket for my herbs & spices. I always buy them in the biggest bags I can find & having loads and loads of little bags floating around the cupboard was getting annoying.

Here's a glimpse inside the cupboard above the washing machine.

We bought all of our white bowls & plates from Ikea when we first moved in because all of my crockery got smashed in the move (don't even ask!) but I've been slowly replacing them with cuter plates and bowls like these!

This is probably my favourite part of the kitchen, I love the silly collage of photos Nick & I put up when we moved in together just over 5 years ago. I love the star shaped fairy lights, my matchy red stuff and my spice rack. The lunchbox is full of all my piping bags and tips. This is kind of a weird space because it goes back quite a long way, I have to really stretch to reach the plug sockets at the back but it's a great place to store all of my spoons, oil sprays, my mini deep fryer and the food processor attachment for my mixer.

This is the wall to the left of the gap leading to the lounge and the pole to the left of the picture is the bottom of the staircase which leads upstairs.

I love this area, it's so bright! We're always adding stuff to the pinboard and we buy a new My Zoetrope calendar every year, they're always so cute! This concludes my kitchen tour, I hope you enjoyed this little peek into my home. Have you done a kitchen tour yet? You should, I'd love to see where you cook!

Cute! I love the idea of keeping your piping tips in a lunchbox, mine are all rolling around in drawers and I can never find the one I want when I need it. And everyone has convinced me that I need one of those calendars for next year!

Yay, I love kitchen tours. You've made great use of space. I am totally the same with the tote bags, I think they breed. I have to do a cull every now and then. The back of my kitchen door is covered with tote bags full of tote bags!

Your kitchen is so colorful and fun! I love it! White/cream cabinets with a thick wood countertop look so awesome! I'm going to have to do a kitchen post too. Mine is kind of boring, but I'll share it anyway. We have matching redness! :D

Fun to see your kitchen--and for me, a kitchen in another country. LOVE the red appliances. Red is my fave. I'll be blogging my redone kitchen soon. Hopefully, the Hurricane will let me have power long enough to finish MoFoing.

ABOUT ME

Oh hey! I'm Jojo! Vegan in Brighton is my travel, food and lifestyle blog. I'm currently living my life on the road as I made the leap from endless wanderluster to full time traveller in January 2015. Find out more about me, my travel plans, my likes and dislikes, and how to work with me on the About Me page.